Bits From My Past Week Or So.



On a Facebook Crohns and Colitis page, I learnt of a research report where nearly 50% of pot smoking Crohns suffers went into remission.   

Caught bits of a radio national program where and author discussed her book about the history of obscenities. She said words like shit were not considered swearing centuries ago because people defecated and fucked in public. Swearing back then was more likely to be oaths against God. No idea what the program was and can’t remember when it was to attempt to find it on the radio national website.

A bit to my surprise, Divine agreed to let me write an article on the medical use of cannabis for people with disabilities.

Thinking about obscenities in the future, will the easy access to porn on the web and virtual reality again make obscenities referring to sex and body parts so inoffensive they become redundant?

Is Peter Heller a bit of a wanker? I am reading his novel The Dog Stars which has a good story, but his writing style keeps on pulling me out of the story. One of his many tricks is not to put dialogue between quote marks and not to use attributions. So on many occasions I need to reread a section to ascertain who is speaking, if anyone. Not good for the flow of a novel. (My next post will probably be a review of The Dog Stars.)

Kept on see OK instead of okay in articles in the Age (refer to previous blog post).  

Is a story’s flow that is interrupted by poorly executed attempts at literary cleverness on par with one whose flow is interrupted by careless typos or the need to use a dictionary every couple of pages?

Read a submission to the NSW enquiry on the medical uses of cannabis from a company that manufactures illegal cannabis medical tinctures in Nimbin (where else?). The report had strictly confidential written on every single page. I am wondering whether it has been put on the NSW government site by mistake.

Finished chapter 96 of the first draft of the manuscript I am writing. It is now 190,000 words.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of Jonathan Franzen's Purity.

Image
Although this blog is mainly about science fiction, I sometimes read pure literature just to see what the other side is up. Jonathon Franzen is one of my favourite non-genre authors and here is a review of Purity, which I just finished reading.   Purity is literature with a plot. The plot revolves around secrets with the two main secrets being Purity’s search for the identity of her father, and the cover-up of a murder. The novel follows four main characters: Purity, Andreas Wolf, Tom and Leila. Purity is a recent university graduate in search of journalism job. She was raised by a controlling, but loving, mother who always got her own way and would argue for hours about the most trivial matters. Andreas Wolf is modelled on Julian Assange, complete with his own version of Wikileaks. Wolf was raised in East Germany and was a reluctant escapee when the wall came down as East Germany was a seemingly perfect place to keep his secrets. Tom is the owner and editor of an invest...
Read more

Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, by Richard Flanagan

Image
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams is about a dying mother, Francie, and the efforts of her adult children to keep her alive, even though she wants to die. The children have lost the ability to communicate with each other, and are out to show they have the power, at least in the case of Anna and Terzo, to keep their mother alive. While Tommy, a failed artist who was looking after Francie, just acquiesces to the will of his other two siblings.  The novel is also about our dying planet, particularly from climate change, as animals go extinct We say we care, but do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. The novel is set in Tasmania while bushfires rage throughout that state and the rest of Australia.  Anna is the main protaganist, a successful architect, who rather than face her mother's pain, her crap relationship with her son, or the raging climate around her, retreats into social media. Frequently forwarding articles she has not read to her friends, showing how she avoids taki...
Read more

New Blog Look.

I have just updated the look of my blog. I am trying to create a consistent web presence online by ensuring that my blog, website and social media look the same and are connected.  This desire for a consistent web presence is a result of what I have learnt in my studies for a Bachelor or Arts (Internet Communications). I have just completed the first two subjects. One of the subjects, Web Communications, had us creating a new web presence, so I created a new blog on Wix, a new Facebook page, a new Twitter account, and joined Wattpad for the first time. As part of the assignment we were supposed to consistently style all the sites. The central node is here . The other subject was an Introduction to Internet Design. In that subject we had to create, from html and CSS code, a website. I choose to do one for author Graham Clements. For that website, I pretended that I had published four novels that are in reality only unpublished, and in need of redrafting, manuscripts. I am quite ...
Read more